“I’m sorry.”
They turned from Clifton Avenue onto Ludlow, past the Esquire Theater, the restaurants and bars and chili parlors. Then Cheryl Beth turned north into the neighborhood, with its old trees and substantial houses, where the tenured professors and old families lived decade after decade. The rolling ground was golden and copper with the fallen leaves.
“Where is your wife?”
“She left me. I don’t blame her.” He said it so simply she almost asked him to repeat it.
“Well, I sure as hell do. That’s horrible!” She blurted it out and was instantly sorry. This was none of her business. She was already getting closer to this patient than she should. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “God, this is a beautiful city. You almost forget it, just being in it every day.”
“Especially doing the job you do.”
“You learn to cope, or you go nuts and hurt yourself or other people,” Will said.
Cheryl Beth thought that sounded a lot like nursing.
She had intended to stop at his apartment to get a coat. Will had other ideas and was very insistent about them. Knowing the way most of Cincinnati was built-old buildings erected long before there was an Americans with Disabilities Act-she thought it would be impossible. But Will had a loft downtown, on Fourth Avenue, and it had an elevator. They repeated the routine with the transfer board, traveled down the cold sidewalk and into the warm lobby of his building. It had been built in 1889 and rehabbed in the 1990s. They rode the elevator to the fourth floor and stepped into an airy, light-filled room. The wheelchair fit through the door with no problem. Will silently looked over his home.
It had potential, especially thanks to the tall, wide windows, but the loft wasn’t much more than a large room filled with some boxes. The main room had two chairs and a desk. The upper level had a bed. The white walls were blank. Cheryl Beth smiled at the bachelor image. He probably had six-month-old takeout in the refrigerator. She didn’t know how long Will had been separated from his wife, but this was obviously just a place to sleep and change clothes.
The problem was that the closet and bed were located on a platform two steps above the rest of the loft. He wanted to change clothes, put on a suit-“it’ll help us get what we want.” So he stayed down on the main level and called out to her what he needed: the charcoal suit, white dress shirt, blue striped tie, black leather dress belt, and black wingtips. “The collar stays are in the shot glass on the closet shelf,” he said. Will had nice clothes and his shoes were highly polished. She brought them down, along with a shoehorn. He might need that.
“I’ll sit up here on the bed,” she said.
“I’m sure you’ve seen half-naked men before.”
Even out of sight, she could tell it was an ordeal. He made breath sounds like a weightlifter and slightly moaned a couple of times. She tried to make conversation, but realized it would be better if she just talked. So she told him about her career, about pain management. He would respond as he could. She never saw patients after they left the hospital. Ones like Will would have lengthy recoveries and burdens to carry long after they were discharged. She knew this, of course. And working in the hospice was different-those patients had only one destination. Will still had a life ahead, but it would be totally different from what he had left behind when he walked in the doors of Memorial. Being here made it especially tactile. She looked around at the remnants of his old life and tears started to fill her eyes. She shook her head and they went away. Dressing took thirty minutes, but when she walked back down he looked quite sharp. He looked dashing.
“You clean up good,” she said. He gathered up a pile of file folders and slipped them into a battered briefcase, then asked her to drape a dark topcoat over his shoulders.
He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a bulky black object. Cheryl Beth was suddenly afraid.
“Will, I don’t think…”
“Somebody’s trying to kill you,” he said quietly. He unholstered the pistol, hit a button, and a long object dropped from the handle of the gun into his hand. Was that the clip? Her father had only taught her to shoot a.22 rifle; she didn’t know more about guns than that. Satisfied that it was loaded, Will slid the magazine back into the grip of the gun with a sharp metal snap. It was a sound that gave her a shiver of dread, but she said nothing. Then he slipped the gun and holster over his belt. He covered it with his suit coat flap and raised himself higher in the wheelchair. He read the concern in her eyes.
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “So what are we going to do?”
“The first thing I want to do is find a photo of Gary Nagle,” he said. “Then I want to go visit our friend Lennie.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Will bluffed his way into the Queensgate Correctional Facility of the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Cop-bitching always worked, especially with a deputy he had known for years. The round, hard face of Sheriff Simon Leis looked down on them from a framed photo. It seemed as if he had been in office forever, as a prosecutor, judge, and then sheriff, and, knowing Cincinnati, Will suspected he would remain in office forever. Si Leis would definitely not approve. The deputy looked over the wheelchair and dubbed him “Chief Ironside.”
“You won’t believe how far the DA is up my ass on this one. I had to leave the hospital early to prepare for this case.”
“Fuckin’ lawyers,” the deputy said and signed him in. “I’d file a grievance over it, Chief.” He looked at Cheryl Beth. “Who’s this?”
“Cheryl Beth Wilson,” Will said. “She’s a criminal justice professor. Why she wants to study this stuff beats the hell out of me.”
“You and me both.” The deputy searched her purse. Then Will locked away his Smith & Wesson semiautomatic in one of the gun lockers, as he had done so many times before. The firearm felt heavier now. Everything felt different. The world outside was enchantingly vast, with every sight, smell, and sensation arousing him as it never had before. His apartment seemed surprisingly tiny. He had been confined to large spaces for so long. He was grateful he couldn’t climb the two steps to the bedroom, because then he would see the bed and think of her. The blank institutional hardness of the jail corridors made forgetting easier.
They entered an empty interrogation room and waited.
“You lie well.” Cheryl Beth smiled at him, but he could see she didn’t completely approve. He offered her a chair but she stayed standing, showing a civilian’s natural discomfort at being inside. He indicated she could pull a chair over to the far wall, closest to the doorway out. She did.
“So have you always been Cheryl Beth?”
“There were four girls named Cheryl in first grade,” she said. “So I used my middle name and just kept using it. I like it.”
“So do I,” Will said.
Then there was a loud thud as the door in front of them was unlocked, momentarily emitting the unsettling noises from inside the jail. A pot-bellied deputy led in Leonard Leroy Corley, charged with assault. Will was momentarily bothered that the charge didn’t specify “on a police officer.” Lennie looked like a different man than Will had wrestled on the hospital floor. Besides the orange jail jumpsuit and shackles, he was clean. The jumpsuit looked amazingly like hospital scrubs.
“Want him cuffed to the table?” the deputy asked.
“No.” Will looked Lennie over and went back to laying out his files. He took his time as the deputy sat Lennie down, and then stood two feet behind him, folding his massive arms.
Cleaned and calm, Lennie looked like he might have been a junior high teacher if the deck of life had been dealt differently, if his face didn’t have a used-up and sorrowful expression. He sat in silence, his handcuffed hands in his lap, his eyes downcast in the prisoner’s survival code: don’t make direct eye contact.